Since textbooks mystify and underplay the role of racism in our past, they have no alternative but to mystify and underplay the role of anti- racism. From the beginning of European settlement in the Americas, some people, including some whites, always opposed slavery. Their opposition must be part of the story of slavery. Otherwise, children may imagine that all whites were racist. Then European American children who still harbor some racial nationalism within their minds may think that they have no one of “their race” with whom to identify. Besides, opposition to slavery provides some ripping good stories.
Bartolomé de Las Casas famously opposed enslaving Native Americans. Almost as infamous is his approval for using African slaves to replace American Indian slaves. Not so well known is his change of heart. Writing of his earlier advice in the third person, Las Casas recanted completely, concluding “that black slavery was as unjust as Indian slavery”:
This advice to give a license for the bringing of black slaves to those lands was first given by the priest Casas, who was unaware of the injustice with which the Portuguese take them and make slaves of them. Later, after falling into this snare, he regretted it, and would not have given that advice for all the world, for he always believed they were enslaved unjustly and tyrannically, because they have the same right to freedom as the Indians.20
Maybe the high point of Las Casas’s life came in 1542, when he took part in perhaps the most important trial ever to take place on Earth. Held at Valladolid, Spain, the issue was, Are Indians human beings, or are they some subordinate species, appropriate for slavery? Amazingly, Las Casas won, if only temporarily. Although Spain reneged and allowed slavery to return to its colonies, centuries after his death Las Casas was still influencing history. Simon Bolivar used his writings to justify the revolutions between 1810 and 1830 that freed Latin America from Spanish domination. Even today, Las Casas inspires movements for justice in Mexico and South America.21
A class might take on the assignment to build a Hall of Fame honoring opponents of slavery. Each student can find and choose a hero. Among the interesting people they can unearth from closer to our time are participants in the Underground Railroad like Levi Coffin, John Rankin, Rowland Robinson, or Harriet Tubman; the unnamed slaves who revolted at Destrehan Plantation, near New Orleans;22 Edward Coles, a Virginia planter who brought his slaves to Illinois, freed them, and took the lead in keeping Illinois from becoming a slave state; Harriet Jacobs, who wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Osceola, Seminole leader; Elijah Lovejoy, killed in Alton, Illinois; the Grimké sisters, banished from South Carolina for their abolitionist views; U.S. spy Elizabeth Van Lew of Richmond; political leaders like Owen Lovejoy, Charles Sumner, and Thaddeus Stevens; Cassius Clay (not the boxer!); and many others.
The fact that slavery was a penal system eluded me for years. This photograph of the cells attached to the Franklin and Armfield slave trading firm in Alexandria, Virginia, helped me see the light. On their home plantations, few slaves had to be kept under lock and key. There they had family ties, friendships, and routines that were hard to break. Moreover, rural life afforded few options for escape. White patrollers would challenge any African American traveling without a pass as a potential runaway. Keeping African Americans in slavery was always more of a problem in cities. The anonymity of urban life made it harder for whites to know whether a black person was free, rented out, or absent from their owner without leave. Many Southern hotels had rooms with barred windows and externally locked doors to draw the trade of owners traveling with a valet or coachman. Owners could lock their slaves in for the night, then retire to their own quarters secure in the knowledge that none could run away. Franklin and Armfield also provided this service for slaveowners visiting Alexandria, advertising “safe keeping at 25¢ per day.”
Many antiracists in our past lost. Andrew Jackson is on our $20 bill, while the Whigs who opposed his forced removal of the Indians from the Southeast lie forgotten. Many opponents of slavery left a record, however. Students can bring them back to life. Above and below the Mason-Dixon Line, families participated in the Underground Railroad. Students can tell their stories, based on careful research.23 Almost every community in the slave states had Unionists during the Civil War. Their stories are important.
Every student needs to learn about white antislavery activists like Coles and Van Lew. Then none can graduate thinking that all whites were racist. All students—especially white Southerners—need to have anti-Confederate and antiracist white Southerners available as role models. Every student needs to learn about black antislavery activists like Jacobs and the Destrehan slaves. Then none can graduate thinking blacks accepted slavery and did nothing about it.
To address the issue of racism in our time, Americans must acknowledge the importance of slavery in our past. “Those plantations were not some sideshow,” says Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family. “This was the trunk of American history, from which the current society has grown.”24 The next two chapters show the lingering influence of slavery even to our time.
FOCUSED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Julius Lester pulls no punches in To Be a Slave (NYC: Dial, 1968). Even more valuable than the paragraphs he extracted from the WPA narratives are his own italicized analytic comments.
George Rawick got the WPA narratives published. In 1972, before the Web (where they are now available, at archives.gov), this was important. In From Sundown to Sunup (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972), Rawick gives a good introduction to slavery.
Ira Berlin, Many Thousand Gone (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998), offers a solid general overview of American slavery and how it changed over time.
In the first pages of The Slave Community (NYC: Oxford UP, 1979), John Blassingame tells of whites enslaved in northern Africa. This helps readers see that “slave behavior” is not racial.
Slavery Remembered by Paul Escott (Chapel Hill: U of NC P, 1979) is based on the WPA narratives. Escott mostly just applied simple arithmetic to them, as students could do, yet the result is a fine book.
In My Bondage and My Freedom (Google Books, books.google.com/books?id=QPNdgtQ1P64C&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22My+Bondage+and+My+Freedom%22&ei=Cd8ESYrqOqDKzQTE35SbAg#PPA78,M1,10/2008 [1857]), Frederick Douglass offers a remarkably balanced account of life in bondage. Thoughtful students can see the erosion of the family, prohibition against meaningful conversation across racial lines, and other subtle aspects of slavery that dehumanize both parties.
The essay on Maryland in Loewen, Lies Across America (NYC: Simon & Schuster, 2000), is my best short statement on what is essential for teachers to know and teach about slavery.
Steven Mintz, “Digital History,” http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/, 7/2008, offers information for teachers on many topics of U.S. history, including slavery. However, some information is wrong or misleading, so use with care.
CHAPTER 9
Why Did the South Secede?
BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR, REPUBLICANS TALKED about “the slave power.” They noted that eleven of our first fifteen presidents were slaveholders or members of the pro-slavery wing of the Democratic Party. So were seven of nine members of the Supreme Court when it decided Dred Scott. They saw slavery’s influence everywhere, and they had a point. Historian Steven Deyle points out that the monetary value of Southern slaves was more than twice that of all other economic investment in the entire United States. No other single interest in U.S. history has ever been so dominant economically or politically.1 “The slave power,” or rather its ideological and economic descendants, still wields considerable influence. One way to see this force in our culture, even today, is by asking students why the South seceded.
TEACHERS VOTE
During 2008, I led workshops for teachers of U.S. history and social studies in Florida, Maryland, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Colorado, California, and Oregon. During the workshops, I asked the teachers, “Why did we have a civil war?” All knew that the Civil War resulted from the secession of South Carolina, followed by ot
her states, so the question became, “Why did South Carolina, followed by ten other Southern states, secede?” The teachers generated four answers:
slavery
states’ rights
tariffs and taxes
the election of Lincoln
They agreed that those answers exhausted the likely alternatives. I then asked them to vote. “This is not Chicago,” I said. “You may only vote once.”
When the polls closed, 16% to 20% had voted for slavery, 2% to about 10% for the election of Lincoln, 60% to 78% for states’ rights, and 5% to 18% for tariffs and taxes. Results were remarkably uniform across the country.
Then I asked, “What should we do now? What would be the best evidence to resolve the matter?” Individuals volunteered “diaries from the time” and “newspaper articles,” a bit vague. I bantered with them: “The diary of an 1859 dairy farmer in Michigan?” Immediately they responded, “No, diaries or articles from Charleston”—better answers, but hardly the best sources. Eventually, in each audience, someone asked, “Wasn’t there some sort of convention? Didn’t it say why South Carolina was leaving the Union?”
Such a convention did meet, of course, in Charleston. In December of 1860, it voted to take South Carolina out of the United States. On Christmas Eve, its members signed a document to explain why, entitled “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” Based on its title alone, it sounded precisely on point, my teachers agreed.
This four-page document begins with a biased and incomplete history of the formation of the United States. Then it lists South Carolina’s grievances against the North:
We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.
The only constitutional obligation that concerned South Carolina in 1860 was the fugitive slave clause, the third clause of the second section of the fourth article. The declaration proceeds to quote it:
No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.
The federal government “passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States,” the declaration then notes. “For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations.”
The document immediately lists the states and the rights they tried to exercise, which South Carolina opposes:
The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution.
New Jersey, the declaration goes on to complain, has done likewise.
Then the convention went on to list other state actions that it denounced. “In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals,” the document protests. This upset South Carolina’s aristocrats, who had grown accustomed to vacationing on Manhattan or Long Island in the summer with their house slaves.
Other states infuriated South Carolina by “elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens.” That sentence, too, refers to African Americans, of course. States in New England let African Americans vote in 1860. For that matter, so had North Carolina until 1835, if they were free and owned enough property. Who was a citizen and therefore could vote was a state matter until the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, adopted after the Civil War. Yet here South Carolina tells us that among its reasons for secession was states’ definition of “citizen” to include African Americans.2
What gave South Carolina the right to feel outraged by black voting in New England? The phrase “by the supreme law of the land” offers a hint. In the 1857 Dred Scott decision, the U.S. Supreme Court had declared African Americans to be an “inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority….” Indeed, the court went on, “they were so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This language delighted South Carolina. But Dred Scott did not exactly take away states’ rights to define voters and citizens:
In discussing this question, we must not confound the rights of citizenship which a State may confer within its own limits, and the rights of citizenship as a member of the Union. It does not by any means follow, because he has all the rights and privileges of a citizen of a State, that he must be a citizen of the United States. He may have all of the rights and privileges of the citizen of a State, and yet not be entitled to the rights and privileges of a citizen in any other State…. The rights which he would acquire would be restricted to the State which gave them.
The State Seal of South Carolina expressed its view of the new nation in 1776. Its front shows twelve spears bound to a palmetto, representing the twelve other original states and South Carolina. The band binding them together bears the inscription “Quis Separabit,” meaning “Who shall separate [us]?” Understandably, the Ordinance of Secession did not feature the state seal.
Thus Dred Scott did not restrict states’ rights to determine citizenship within their own borders.3 South Carolina’s outrage at the states in New England that let blacks vote was not really justified by “the supreme law of the land.” Like some other parts of the declaration, this claim by South Carolina distorts the facts. It does show South Carolina’s opposition to states’ rights whenever the states and the rights favored blacks or seemed to threaten slavery.4
South Carolina was further upset that Northern states “have permitted open establishment among them of [abolitionist] societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States.” Presumably Northern states do not have the right to let their citizens assemble and speak freely—not if what they say might threaten slavery or offend South Carolina. South Carolinians also gave as a reason for secession that Northerners “have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery.” Thus, they contested the rights of residents of other states even to speak negatively about their “peculiar institution.”
In short, South Carolina was not for states’ rights, but against them. As these excerpts show, concern about slavery permeates the document. None of the teachers in my audiences who had voted for states’ rights as a cause of the Civil War meant that South Carolina seceded against states’ rights, indeed was outraged at states’ rights. Yet that would be more accurate.
Those teachers who chose “the election of Lincoln” did not err. His victory was a trigger, not an underlying reason, but is correct as an immediate cause, and the South Carolina document says so. Of course, Lincoln triggered secession because he and his party opposed the extension of slavery into the territories, which in turn portended the decline and eventual end of the institution. Thus, this cause of secession too is all about slavery. The “Declaration of Immediate Causes” never refers to any issues about tariffs or taxes. In all, then, most K–12 teachers today—65% to 80%—do not know why the South seceded. This ignorance is not sectional but national, making this exercise worth doing anywhere in the U.S., not just in the Carolinas.5
The people who voted—and mostly voted wrong—are presenting this issue to the next generation of Americans. Even if we fixed this problem tomorrow morning, most of the people leading our government and other institutions in the year 2050 will have been miseducated on th
is point. But we have not fixed the problem. Paradoxically, the fact that most teachers still misteach secession shows the extraordinary reach of “the slave power,” even today.6
TEACHING AGAINST THE MYTH
The silver lining is, the foregoing referendum makes for a gripping teaching activity for students. As they approach the Civil War, teachers can invite students to come up with all the reasons they can as to why South Carolina, followed by ten other states, seceded. Students who respond “I don’t know” can be prodded with “What have you heard?” or “What do you think?” Then they might be set loose to research the matter—in their textbook, other textbooks, the web, and books in the library treating the Civil War and the steps leading to it. Eventually, the four alternatives will surface; probably no other suggestion will draw much support.
Once in a while, a student simply refuses to believe the document. Its title, timing, and adoption by the convention that took South Carolina out of the U.S. make it a “smoking gun.” Nevertheless, the student (or their parents) is so disappointed that their choice of states’ rights or tariffs and taxes was not correct that they cannot accept it. History teachers cannot accept this as a mere difference of opinion, any more than geography teachers could allow a student to maintain that the world is flat. Everyone has a right to his/her own opinion, to be sure, including every elementary student (and every parent). As the first chapter pointed out, however, people do not have the right to their own facts. They must back up their opinions with real evidence. Students who claim that South Carolina seceded over states’ rights, disagreements over tariffs or taxes, or for that matter, anything else, must find some evidence from 1859–61 to back up those positions. They also must explain why South Carolina never mentioned such reasons in their primary document telling why they seceded.
Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History Page 25